Friday, May 19, 2017

Northern Peoples Seek to Reverse Putin’s Amalgamation of Their Land with Ethnic Russian Kray

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 18 – Twelve activists
are calling for a referendum that would reverse the 2005 amalgamation of the
Dolgan-Nenets Autonomous District and Krasnoyarsk Kray and restore
Dolgan-Nenets as an autonomous district.They say they have been driven to take that step because of the precipitous
decline in the standard of living of Northern peoples there.

Another activist, Gennady Shchukin,
a representative of the Association of Indigenous Numerically Small Peoples of
the Taymyr, says that the kray officials don’t understand the nature of life in
the Taymyr. They fly over the region in helicopters and think that “we have
trolleybuses and trains” even though reindeer herding is the basis of the economy.

The kray government is slated to
take up the question of registering the initiative group today.The leaders of the group expect to be turned
down, but regardless of whether they are, they insist, “they will continue the
struggle.” The peoples of the North are slow to anger, they say; but now that
they are, there is no turning back.

The Taymyr Dolgano-Nenets District
was created in 2005 out of the former Dolgano-Nenets Autonomous District when
it was folded into Krasnoyarsk kray as part of Vladimir Putin’s now-stalled
regional amalgamation effort. Just under 30 percent of its population consists
of people of the indigenous nationalities of the North.

Kray officials and some Moscow experts say
that the Dolgano-Nenets cause has no future because the area has insufficient
resources. LDPR deputy Aleksandr Gliskov of the Krasnoyarsk legislative
assembly says that the region would only suffer not only economically but
socially and politically with the return of “feudal” overlords.

Natalya Zubarevich, the head of the
Moscow Independent Institute of Social Policy, agrees and that there is no
possibility of turning back the clock even though “all former autonomies are
dissatisfied with the unification” that Kremlin mandated. Some lost jobs, and
all saw their overall economic situation decline despite the center’s promises.

Even
if none of these efforts succeed, they are certain to add a new element to
Russian political life, simultaneously highlighting the ways in which Moscow
has typically treated non-Russians as chess pieces it can move about at will
and also, and perhaps more immediately significant, the failure of Vladimir
Putin to understand the dangers amalgamation entails.